Braun's Bethlehem near Kuks

In a wood a couple of kilometres north of Kuks, the Baroque sculptor Matthias Bernard Braun and his workshop carved saints, hermits and biblical scenes straight into the sandstone boulders that lie scattered across the forest floor. The result, known as Betlém or Braun's Bethlehem, is an open-air gallery in which the figures seem to emerge from the rock itself: a reclining Mary Magdalene reading in a hollow of stone, the bearded hermit Onuphrius, the hermit Juan Garín beside his cave, a reclining Saint Jerome, a torso of John the Baptist, a group at Jacob's Well, and large reliefs of the Vision of Saint Hubert, the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Arrival of the Magi.

The project belonged to Count Franz Anton von Sporck, the art-loving lord of Kuks, who bought the forest in February 1717 and turned it into a landscape for religious contemplation. From 1718 he founded seven hermitages in the wood, dedicated to saints including Anthony, Paul, Francis, Jerome, Hubert, Giles and Bruno, and settled hermits there. Braun, whose allegorical Virtues and Vices already decorated Sporck's hospital at Kuks, began his work in the forest around 1723; the last major piece, a statue of a Christian warrior, went up in 1732. The sandstone was quarried on the spot, and the figures were originally painted in bright colours. A nativity cave once held wooden figures, of which only one survives.

What stands today is weathered and often fragmentary, and that is part of its strange power: moss and lichen soften the drapery, and the line between carved figure and natural rock has blurred over three centuries. Stone quarrying for the fortress of Josefov in the 1780s raised the ground around some of the works and damaged others, and several pieces, among them the Christian warrior and Saint Jerome, were moved to the garden of the Kuks hospital. Braun's Bethlehem has been a national cultural monument of the Czech Republic since 2001. Kuks itself is a village of a few hundred people on the Elbe, where Sporck first built a spa in the 1690s and then, between 1707 and 1715, a hospital with the Church of the Holy Trinity; the whole Baroque ensemble is protected as a monument reservation.

Getting there

The sculptures lie in the Nový les forest about 2 km north of Kuks, close to the village of Stanovice, between the towns of Dvůr Králové nad Labem (about 4.5 km away) and Jaroměř. The nearest airport is Pardubice Airport (PED), about 43 km to the south.